11/18/2009 @ 12:01AM

A Tale Of Two Sarahs

In the wake of this week’s Palinpalooza, not to mention the $5 million advance she received for her memoir, it might be a stretch to call Sarah Palin “Dickensian.” But after reading excerpts from her book Going Rogue and listening to her roll out interviews, I felt as though I were watching an ironic tale of two Sarahs. Indeed, these may seem like the best of times for the GOP vice presidential nominee and her bank account. But there’s a lot to suggest that the 2008 campaign–and the monster celebrity caricature it spawned–was the worst thing that could have happened to her long-term political aspirations.

Don’t get me wrong. Palin unquestionably owes her iconic status and the unparalleled platform it provides to John McCain for plucking her out of her obscurity and putting her on the ticket last year. Forget the book deal, Oprah blowout and million Facebook friends: Without her sensational run as the Republican vice presidential nominee, no one would be mentioning the former Alaskan governor (who would still be in her first term) as a plausible presidential candidate, let alone front-runner. She would still be just a twinkle in Bill Kristol’s eye.

But it’s just as obvious that Palin was not ready for her national close-up and that as a result her meteoric rise came at a terrible cost to her public image and presidential viability. Exit polls showed that 60% of voters–and 65% of the decisive independent vote–came away convinced she was not qualified to be in the White House. More important, many swing voters were so put off by her un-presidentialness and lack of competence that they were driven to vote against McCain. Nearly half of all moderates said Palin was a significant factor in their decision, and they broke for Obama 60-40.

This was the last kind of image problem a Republican could afford to have in the post-Bush era, least of all someone with Palin’s experience and policy gaps. Yet since the campaign ended, Palin has seemed bent on magnifying instead of mollifying it, reinforcing her standing among suspicious swing voters as the next George Wallace, instead of the next Ronald Reagan. The inflammatory and truth-stretching Facebook posts about death panels, the ongoing soap-operatic feuds with McCain campaign staffers and the teenage (Playgirl-posing) father of her granddaughter, and the incoherent explanation for her resignation have collectively kept Palin trapped in the credibility hole she found herself in last November.

That’s the clear verdict of the Palin polling recently released to coincide with the beginning of her supposed comeback. Yes, she is more popular than ever with the conservative base–her positive rating is at 76% among increasingly right-leaning Republicans. But despite all the opportunities Palin has had over the last year to communicate with the American people, the Washington Post/ABC News poll out this week found that 60% of voters still believe she is not qualified to be president.

Moreover, 53% definitively said they would not vote for Palin if she ran in 2012, with 9% saying they would support her and 37% saying they would consider it. A similar poll done in 2006 found that 42% flatly ruled out Hillary Clinton, at the time widely considered the most polarizing figure in American politics; in that same poll, 28% said no to McCain. Perhaps most troubling for Palin, the Post/ABC poll found that independent and Democratic women–who should represent Palin’s most fertile crossover audience–were more apt than men to find her unqualified and unacceptable.

Now imagine for the sake of argument what would have happened if Palin had been passed over by McCain. Most of the well-known advantages she has now, which immediately make her a formidable Republican primary contender, would be stripped away–not least her incomparable fundraising potential. But so too would the abundant vulnerabilities that would at this rate debilitate and potentially decapitate a general election candidacy in 2012. She would go back to being Sarah from Wasilla–and at this moment, in this political environment, that might be a much better persona and platform for launching a credible national campaign.

To see why, you first have to remember Palin’s pre-Rogue record and brand. While she also rose quickly in Alaska, it was not as a polarizing, social conservative hardliner, but a pragmatic center-right reformist. In 2006 she managed to take out a sitting Republican governor in a primary by 32 points and then went on to beat a former Democratic governor in the general election, despite spending substantially less on campaigning. She ran against corruption and cronyism and politics as usual, not against the media or liberal elites. And she strongly connected with middle-class voters who saw a lot of themselves in her.

As governor she built up high bipartisan approval ratings–one poll had her at over 90%–by working with Democrats in the legislature to pass a major ethics bill and authorize construction of a transnational gas pipeline. Say what you will about the Sarah Palin we saw in the pressure cooker in 2008, you don’t accomplish those things (in Alaska or anywhere else) without some significant political acumen and skills.

You also have to consider the mood of the country at the end of the first year of the Obama era. The same elites who have been reflexively writing off Palin have been underestimating the depth and breadth of populist anger that has been growing in the wake of the poorly executed bailouts, the massive expansion of government, and the widely shared sense that Washington is every bit as broken under Obama as it was in the Bush and Clinton years. That doesn’t mean Obama will be easily deposed. But it does mean that the most dangerous opponent for him at this point would likely be a positive, problem-solving populist who could tap into that pervasive feeling of economic and political alienation and unite those next-generation Perot voters.

On paper at least, the unspoiled Palin would be well positioned to fill that role in the 2012 campaign. Yes, she would start out largely unknown and uncredentialed. But it was not an accident that Kristol and other conservative thought leaders became enamored of her prior to her elevation to the national stage–or that McCain would choose to roll the dice on her. They saw her as the political equivalent of the pre-NBA Kobe Bryant: a rough, unformed talent with tremendous upside given her gender, back story and potential crossover appeal.

Just look at Mike Huckabee. He started out in 2007 with a very similar profile to Palin (little-known governor of a lightly regarded state with a religious bent). Yet despite running a ramshackle campaign and alienating a big bloc of economic conservatives, Huckabee was the last man standing with McCain in the 2008 primaries. That was before the financial collapse in the fall, and the bailout backlash and Tea Party movement that followed.

It’s quite conceivable, then, that pre-Rogue Palin–the one who would still be governor today, who would have in all likelihood continued governing from the center-right, and whose daughter would have had her illegitimate child outside the glare of the national spotlight–could have been the Huckabee of 2012: the fresh-faced dark horse who naturally excites a big chunk of the Republican base, meaning she would not have to pander the way Mitt Romney did in 2008 and could have a fair shake at keeping independents open minded. Perhaps best of all, Palin would have been able to deliberately control and form her own image, a luxury she was denied when she became an overnight sensation last August.

All of that, of course, presupposes some big things. First, that with more seasoning, Palin would have been able to contain her polarizing tendencies (and what many have come to see as a mean streak) and hew to the more inclusive style of politics she practiced while winning her breakthrough gubernatorial race. Second, that she would have put together a smart, disciplined campaign staff to compensate for her inexperience and weaknesses. And most important, that she would have wisely spent the interim years boning up on national policy issues, especially national security, so she would pass the threshold credibility tests she so badly failed last year with swing voters.

Those are some serious ifs, especially in light of Palin’s recent track record. First, to continue with the Dickens parallel, her book and recent interviews suggest she is more Whiny Tim than Artful Dodger–flogging petty grievances a year after the campaign is over is hardly presidential behavior. Second, even with her status as the most celebrated Republican in the country, she has surrounded herself with an inept political team that has bungled the simplest tasks of political blocking and tacking and only exacerbated her competence issues among insiders (which matters in presidential primary politics). Third, she has done nothing tangible or memorable over the last year to begin filling her qualifications gap, save for one unremarkable overseas trip.

Taken together, those signs suggest that it would not matter if Palin had been left to develop into a national figure on her own time frame, and that she would likely be unelectable in 2012 either way. But I still tend to think that she would be taken more seriously by more voters if she had gone reform instead of going rogue. The unspoiled Palin could have used a creditable run in 2012 as a credibility-establishing springboard to at least be a broadly influential figure in American politics, if not a competitive candidate in 2016. If nothing else, she would have been able to control her own destiny.

Now, with all the baggage Palin accumulated in last year’s campaign and added in the year since, she seems locked into a path as well as a persona. It may be a seductive and lucrative one. And she may even lay claim to the Republican nomination in 2012 (assuming she does not become the GOP version of Howard Dean, done in by her perceived unelectability in November). But unless she can find a way to miraculously erase the center’s devastating sense that she is too small-minded to succeed, and convince swing voters that the woman who could not tell us what newspapers she reads can lead us out of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, her book sales may well be the only great expectations she ever meets.

Dan Gerstein, a political communications consultant and commentator based in New York, is the founder and president of Gotham Ghostwriters. He formerly served as communications director to Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and as a senior advisor on his vice presidential and presidential campaigns. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.